A New Environment

Abstract

In her novel Felix Holt, the Radical (1866), George Eliot took as her subject matter the condition of life in a Midlands community nearly forty years earlier. This choice of subject she was to amplify only a few years later in her next novel, Middlemarch (1871–2). Both novels were written in the shadow of the second Reform Bill of 1867; both concern themselves with changes inherent in those social movements which lay behind the first Reform Bill of 1832. In Felix Holt she announced her priorities in a carefully prepared ‘Introduction’, in which she takes her reader on an imaginary journey by stagecoach ‘five and thirty years ago’ through ‘that central plain, watered at one extremity by the Avon, at the other by the Trent’. Referring to the possibility that transportation might become even more expeditious, she calls up an idealised memory of the old coaching days:

Posterity may be shot, like a bullet from a tube, by atmospheric pressure from Winchester to Newcastle: that is a fine result to have among our hopes; but the slow old-fashioned way of getting from one end of our country to the other is the better thing to have in the memory.

George Eliot, Felix Holt (1866), Introduction.